In the world of extreme sports filmmaking there are hundreds of different types of filming equipment. Unfortunately, this field is divided. Cheap equipment does not provide the quality needed by many filmmakers, and professional equipment is bulky and expensive, often requiring trained personnel to operate. Filming and photographing extreme sports on location with professional equipment and a film crew is prohibitively expensive for most filmmakers, while cheap equipment can break or lead to poor quality results.
An example of a professional image capturing system can be seen in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/470,461 filed on Sep. 6, 2006 by Giegerich et al. which describes a structure and method capable of positioning cameras for multiple viewing angles. This structure and method requires a significant investment of time, personnel, and finances in order to use, and is therefore outside the reach of the majority of filmmakers. Also, many on location environments are unable to support this setup.
Often the filmmaker is the only person on the film crew and is also required to appear in the shot. To get these shots, filmmakers have created all sorts of homemade attachments, accessories, and mounts which are frequently made from sticks, cardboard, scavenged parts, and even duct tape. These temporary solutions are specific to each filmmaker's needs for a particular situation and must be disassembled once the needs or available equipment changes. A significant amount of time and money can be wasted on trying to fabricate or reconfigure a camera mount for different situations resulting in longer and more expensive film production.
While there are camera mounting and positioning systems in the art, they are limited in many aspects. They are configured for a limited amount of mounting and positioning options and are unable to work with different systems and cameras resulting in the filmmaker needing multiple systems for each video shoot.
Therefore a need exists for a novel camera positioning and mounting system capable of accepting and receiving different cameras and accessories. There is also a need for the system to be able to secure the camera to a variety of structures in order to accommodate small or no film crew situations. Finally, there is a need for the system to be rapidly reconfigurable and interchangeable to adapt to different environments.